Comments by "Rutvik" (@rutvikrs) on "Did Medieval Buddhists, Brahmins, Jains eat or Ban Meat? The Real History" video.

  1. ​ @orkkojit  1. I don't think people today realise how rare meat was, in the post agrarian to pre industrial phases. Most people have universalised the history of North Western Europe which had negligible agriculture. Everyone ate meat but not at the rate we do today. A good rule of thumb is if your hyper local festival has a harvest/communal festival with sacrifice, meat was historically rare.(Eid, Chhat, Ugadi). If your festival has dietary restriction, meat was the norm(Lent). 2. Several misconceptions on chicken, it's likely that Hiuen Tsang was referring to local fowl, not chicken. The cheap and ubiquitous chicken and eggs we eat today are a product of the broiler revolution in the 30's and reached India in the 70's(silver revolution). We did not have organised and centralised poultry only domestication and hunting. Chickens used to weigh less than a kilogram, were bottom feeders eating bamboo shoots and worms. They were worse than pork. There was significant historical stigma attached to the bird because it was used for cock fights. 2. From the traditional history, the Bengali diet was much like its historical origin in the Shakta belt of the subcontinent(MP, MH to Southern Karnataka, Bengal was settled very late in history), vegetarian and for the most part(tribal pescatarianism seeped in as with any riverian/coastal practice), red meat was strictly ritualistic. During the harvest festival, human sacrifice was the initial practice, substituted by buff/venison, later by goats and fowl. Chicken entered very recently during the secularisation of the Pujo.
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